Sound And Fury

What is true, absolutely true, is that Blizzard does not allow people to play Diablo III while they are not connected live to their servers. It is at this point that interpretation, reason, and cynicism create a drifting mobile of warring, caustic realities.

To put things diplomatically, this is a matter about which Gabriel and I do not agree. The growing ubiquity of Internet access keeps him from feeling any tremendous sympathy for the increasingly thin band of edge cases. Plus, and this may be applied as a generality, he is unfond of hippies and this type of complaint is situated in the continuum of Hippie-Type Shit, like how James tipped your bong after a monster rip and the whole fucking thing is seriously like whatever.

For my part, and I’m not, like, The Lord or anything, but the gulf between able to install a Spawn copy of the game and not being able to play offline at all seems pretty deep. Don’t really know what else to tell you. I saw that Blizzard came out with a response response, expressing their surprise at the consumer reaction, when this is more or less how consumers react every single time they learn the precise circumference of their golden leash.

By their own admission, Diablo isn’t not really focused around a PVP experience; if you’re playing with someone who has duped items or whatever, all it means is that you will be more likely to defeat Satan. Without a means to gain advantage over another, “cheating” as a concept becomes substantially more opaque. Who is the cheated party, precisely? Satan the Devil? Fuck him, who cares.

Who is being cheated? This is the part of the movie where, in a series of retrospective realizations cut with you looking at your own face in the rearview mirror, you come bit by bit to the heart of it. The person you are cheating is Blizzard, Blizzard in the aggregate, with your attempts to interfere with their digital marketplace. You mustn’t play offline or goof around with your files or any other naughty business because they are endeavoring to transform your putative ownership into a revenue stream.